The ASEAN Plus Three meeting in India included quite a few no-shows. Both China and South Korea skipped the meeting of finance chiefs from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (plus Japan, China and South Korea).
The meeting was supposed to be an important opportunity for the finance chiefs of these countries to meet as they prepared for the Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting that began on Saturday.
The South Korean finance ministry official said that the chief wasn’t there because he was “busy” with internal issues in his country and “disappointed” that he couldn’t be there. The Chinese finance minister couldn’t be there because of “a domestic meeting.”
A former senior Japanese finance official in India said the Chinese and South Korean finance chiefs’ absence at ASEAN Plus Three was “apparently because of a deterioration” in Japanese-Chinese and Japanese-South Korean relations.